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SAP Releases Full sapdb Source
A reader writes: "SAP has released full source of their sapdb sql database system under the GPL.
It can be found at http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/sapdb/deve lop/dev_sources.htm
It's probably the most complete free database system available
right now, with much more features than interbase, mysql or postgresql.
The codebase seems to be rather old and is written in a mix of Pascal
and C. It contains interfaces to Perl and various languages."
According to the official SAP DB FAQ:
Another FAQ entry answers the question of whether SAP is merely dumping the database on the open-source community so somebody else can clean up their old code:
Also, remember that SAP makes money on consulting/support services. So SAP AG would be foolish to release it merely to pass the burden of providing support on to the community.
Sap DB has many features and administrative tools still lacking in PostgreSQL.
Try real archiving and replication, for instance. Being able to specify where to allocate tables and indices without using "ln -s". An overwriting storage manager so you don't need to VACUUM nightly (or hourly as some do on very busy systems).
That just scratches the surface.
Yes, PG is vastly improved and I'm a big fan. And much of the above list is scheduled for PG 7.2. But today it's PG 7.1 and PG doesn't have these features.
OpenACScurrently is supporting Oracle and PostgreSQL with our upcoming OpenACS 4.x product. Sap DB is very likely to become the third RDBMS we support with the toolkit.
This makes SAP feel very very uncomfortable.
Releasing a high quality (?don't really know, but that's the impression that SAP would like to make, I'm sure) DB as Open Source attacks Oracle's stated commitment to Open Source - by comparison - and puts something out there to compete with Oracle on the cheap-end, which is becoming more important all the time with the New Economy collapse.
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Thousands of dollars? More like hundreds of thousands, I think.
SAP R/3 has an abstraction layer that allows it to run on top of many different databases, including Oracle and DB/2. It may also run on top of sapdb, but few if any R/3 installations actually do so. During the year I spent working for a consulting company specializing in SAP implementations, I never even heard of sapdb, much less of anyone actually using it on an installation - everyone was using Oracle or DB/2. No doubt this has played a role in their decision to open it up.
So I wouldn't expect sapdb to be a particularly high-quality database - SAP's strength is in business applications, not the databases they run on top of. If you're interested in an open-source database, you should probably stick with one of the ones that already has an established open-source following and developer community.
And yet every time I read a story about a company discontinuting a piece of software, everybody says 'oh, then they should open source it, so we can continue to get benefit from it.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Everyone, raise your hand if you've purchased a license for SAP DB as a standalone product, without the (still commercial) SAP core product (SAP R/3).
Anyone? I thought not. So OSSing SAP DB isn't costing SAP any (or maybe very little) lost license fees.
Now since the DB is OSS, it has the potential to have a lot of community development work devoted to it. This work is done for free of course.
Theres also some good publicity for SAP (at the very least a post on /.). This could spin off into more sales of SAP R/3. But if it doesn't, then there's really nothing lost.
If the product takes off, SAP could start offering commercial support (a la Red Hat & IBM for Linux).
Best of all, businesses now have the option of using a free enterprise-worthy DBMS (look out SQL Server). How much would you like to bet that SAP starts advertising how well their SAP R/3 product integrates with their own database?
As a technical consultant for SAP America, I can say with certainty that SAP DB (previously known as Adabas), is far better than mySQL and Postgres SQL. It has had full transaction processing for many years and is quite comparable in performance to the other big ones like MS-SQL Server and Oracle 8. Although I don't think it is quite as good as them, it's definitely in the same league. (I'll see if I can dig up some benchmarks...)
Nevertheless, SAP DB is a full-blown Relational DB. Many European companies are "live" with their production systems using SAP DB as the backend.
I'm surprised more people haven't started using SAP DB now that it's fully GPL'd. If you need a real DB that can really scale and can't afford to buy Oracle or MS-SQL server, this is the one to get!
Btw, Open Source is not something that's new to SAP. When you buy SAP R/3, you get all the source code to all of the programs that execute on the R/3 system. Many customers heavily modify the code to adapt it to their own business processes. (The core "kernel" code is not open source and probably never will be.)
I think SAP is on the right track. Open Source is really starting to make sense to some companies. Hopefully the rest will realize this, too.
I run the enterprise application and database support grop at a large canadian University. We have a considerable investment in Oracle RDBMS and some of our DBA's and App developers have been working w/ oracle for >10yrs.
,4GL, dbcentric development environment. I am trying to get some University resources to remedy this situation though.
We started examining SAPDB for functionality in Feb and what we have found is that the feature set is about the same as Ora 7.3. The management command line interface looks vaguely mainframish (not a problem to my view) but is fairly intuitive and straight forward.An Nt gui management console and sql studio is available as well. Much cleaner than Oracle Enterprise Manager if not as many features.
As far as speed goes. It seems to faster than Oracle but we have no load test as yet. The fact that it is used as the backend to SAPR3 suggests that scalability should not be a problem.
Point in time recovery and mature transaction handling is also a big plus.
In short . . . SAPDB kicks ass feature wise on all the other Open Source stuff we have played with. At the RDBMS level SAPDB competes well with Commercial guys. All db geeks need to take a look . . . you will be impressed. The Pointies will like the "value proposition"
The problem with SAPDB is the same as with all Opensource DB's. No affordable, robust
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